01.

The music was too loud for me to hear Kavya properly, so I read her lips instead. Where's the washroom? I pointed toward the corridor behind the old chemistry block, where someone had strung fairy lights along a stone archway that had probably seen better decades. She nodded, mouthed something that might have been five minutes, and disappeared back into the crowd near the speakers.

Five minutes. I gave it fifteen before I stopped pretending to enjoy myself and went looking for her.

St. Aurelia threw one of these at the start of every term, though nobody under the age of forty called it a "welcome social." Fairy lights on colonial arches, a DJ set up where a Jesuit chapel bell used to hang, plastic cups of something that was technically punch. My roommate Diya said it was the closest thing to fun the university allowed itself before midterms buried everyone. I mostly went because staying in my room alone at ten p.m., with my father's old notebooks stacked on the desk, felt worse than being surrounded by people I didn't know well enough to talk to.

The corridor past the archway was quieter. Older buildings did that. They swallowed sound the way people swallowed things they didn't want to say. My shoes stuck slightly to the floor, someone's spilled drink from earlier in the evening, and the lighting changed from string light gold to the flat white of an emergency bulb that had survived several administrations.

I heard the water running before I saw him.

It was one of the smaller washrooms, the kind meant for faculty rather than three hundred drunk undergraduates, tucked behind a door that said STAFF ONLY in letters half worn off. The door was open. He hadn't bothered closing it, which told me something before I even saw his face. That he wasn't worried about being found.

He was standing at the sink with his sleeves pushed back, watching the water run pink and then clear over his knuckles. Not looking at me. Not looking at anything really, except his own hands, with the kind of attention you'd give a report you already knew the ending of.

"There's a first aid kit near the DJ table," I said. "In case you were looking for one and ended up here instead."

He didn't jump. People who get startled easily don't stand with their back to an open door. He turned the tap off, unhurried, and looked at me in the mirror before he turned around properly, like he wanted to see me twice.

"I wasn't looking for one."

"Could've fooled me."

"It's not that bad." He held up his hand as if to prove it, and it wasn't. The skin across two knuckles was split, already closing, more embarrassing than dangerous. Still. People didn't usually walk away from parties with knuckles like that unless something had happened that nobody was going to talk about at brunch tomorrow.

"Somebody's face lose an argument?" I asked.

"Something like that."

"You're not going to elaborate."

"No."

I should have left it there. I want that on record, for whatever it's worth. I knew, in the part of my brain that had spent nineteen years watching my mother read a room before she said a single word, that this was the moment to turn around, go find Kavya, and forget the boy with the bleeding hand. Instead I stayed exactly where I was, arms crossed, because something about the flatness of his voice made me want to see what was underneath it. That's a professional hazard, apparently. My mother says I diagnose people the way other people make small talk.

He dried his hands on a paper towel, folded it in half, then in half again, like precision mattered even here, even now. Then he looked at me properly for the first time, not the mirror version, the real one, and something in his expression shifted, so briefly I almost missed it. Recalibration. The look of someone updating a file.

"You're new," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Everyone's new. It's the start of term."

"You're new to this." He gestured, vaguely, at the corridor, the party noise leaking in from behind us, all of it. "You don't know who I am."

I laughed, actually laughed, because of how he said it. Not arrogant, not a boast, just stated, the way you'd tell someone the exit was to their left. "Should I?"

"Most people do."

"I've been here three weeks. I know where the library is and which chai stall doesn't water down the milk. I'm still working on names."

He studied me a moment longer than the comment deserved. I've thought about that look a hundred times since, tried to name it and never quite managed to. Not attraction, not yet. Something closer to the way you'd look at a puzzle piece that had landed somewhere you weren't expecting one to fall.

"Ruan," he said finally, and didn't offer a surname, as though that alone should mean something, and the not offering was its own kind of statement.

"Navira." I didn't offer mine either, out of some reflexive stubbornness, some refusal to be the one who gave more than she got. "Though I get the feeling you weren't going to ask."

Something crossed his face. Not quite a smile. A door opening a centimeter and shutting again.

"No," he agreed. "I wasn't."

There was a beat where neither of us said anything, and the silence didn't feel awkward so much as occupied, the way a held breath is occupied. Somewhere down the corridor the bass from the speakers thudded through the old stone, and closer, water dripped once from the tap he hadn't shut all the way.

"Well." I pushed off the doorframe. "Good luck with the knuckles. And whatever face they used to lose the argument."

I was three steps down the corridor, already composing the version of this story I'd tell Kavya (there was this guy, bleeding, very calm about it, world's worst bedside manner), when he spoke again, not loudly, not needing to be.

"It was nice to finally meet you, Navira Kapoor."

I stopped.

I hadn't told him my surname.